Listen to Amanda Babb, Principal Consultant for Praecipio Consulting, discuss the value that Cumulus Cloud, a comprehensive hosting solution, brings to your enterprise organization.
Jared van de Crommert: Welcome to the Atlassian Advantage Podcast series. Here is our next episode Hosting in the Cloud with Atlassian.
Sean O'Sullivan: Hi everyone. I'd like to thank you all for joining us again today for our latest podcast featuring private cloud hosting with the Atlassian suite. This is Sean O'Sullivan, the Sales Director of the Atlassian team at Carahsoft. And I'm joined today by Principal Consultant at Praecipio Consulting, Amanda Babb. Amanda, thank you so much for joining us today.
Amanda Babb: Thank you so much, Sean. I'm very excited to be here. This is my first ever podcast that I'm recording, although I'm a huge fan of ya'lls podcasts. I listen religiously so glad to be here.
Sean O'Sullivan: Awesome. Well, we're excited to have you here. So Amanda, Carahsoft receives a lot of questions when it comes to Atlassian cloud migration and hosting. So I'm really excited to talk to you today about how Praecipio's hosting services, deliver, server, and data center additions of Atlassian software suite hosted by Cumulus Cloud. So let's get started with my first question here. Let's be clear, right? What is Cumulus Cloud and what are the benefits it brings as a hosting solution?
Amanda Babb: Yeah, absolutely. So Cumulus was the brain child of my friend and colleague Michael Kelly, he developed the platform in 2014. And essentially it's a hosting platform that optimizes the actual infrastructure solutions for the Atlassian products. We try not to host anything other than the Atlassian products, unless of course there is a specific need from a customer in terms of additional infrastructure. So in terms of performance what you got is you get all of the benefits and flexibility of a server or data center Atlassian product without having to manage the infrastructure yourselves. We take all of that on for you. We have specific performance tuning, network infrastructure, all of those kinds of things to make them fully stable and perform it and available for you so that you don't have to "bother with it". But you still have the flexibility of the server and data center Atlassian products.
Sean O'Sullivan: Sure. Okay. So then, we know Amanda that there are other folks out there. Right? That can provide hosted solutions for Atlassian. So what's differentiating Cumulus Cloud from those other solutions?
Amanda Babb: So again our hosting platform is dedicated solely to the Atlassian products. So our breadth of experience and working with the product since 2006. Again we know exactly the right way to maximize performance, understanding specifically what sort of infrastructure is needed so you're not overpaying or underpaying or don't have the right infrastructure for the hosting. We also have a secure and safe environment that's fully compliant with security and privacy requirements. And then also we provide 24/7 monitoring of the application performance as well as any of those problem areas. So that if something does happen we're able to immediately respond, but we're also proactively identifying and resolving issues before those failures occur. And we're keeping you informed of what those things are as well.
Sean O'Sullivan: Gotcha. And I think it's important to remind our customers as well, right? That Praecipio serves as a platinum Atlassian solution partner. Right? The highest tier possible so we know that there's no question when it comes to expertise regarding Atlassian solutions and everyday nooks and crannies, if you will. Right? When customers are using the product. So could you then Amanda provide us some insight regarding the top reasons to consider an outsourced hosting and managed IT service. Right? Everyone thinks they know how to do it themselves. And then sometimes they have to revert back. They call folks like Praecipio. So why don't we just break it down for them now. Hey, why should they be doing this upfront and getting it done the right way?
Amanda Babb: Yeah. So the first piece is really that reduced cost of ownership. A lot of enterprise organizations, and even small to midsize organizations may not have a completely knowledgeable IT staff that can go ahead and actually spin up the right infrastructure, the right support services, the right everything for the Atlassian products. It's just a reality that a lot of IT folks are spread thin across multiple technologies, multiple platforms, multiple everything. In addition to the fact that they're constantly having to shift and learn new things based on just the rapid pace of technology. So having a group of folks that can come in, get you set up on the Atlassian products, manage them for you as well as do the configuration tweaks, the front end types of things in order to better support your business processes is really a benefit. So that your actual IT resources can focus more on things like, "Okay, how are we going to do integrations with maybe our more massive enterprise systems?" Things like business intelligence or moving overall product platforms to microservices models, et cetera, et cetera.
So if we can take that burden off your plate, we're more than happy to do so. There's also the flexibility as well. So because we're talking about the server and data center products from Atlassian, a lot of folks really like those because they can "do more with them". So if you need extensive time tracking or financial monitoring or if you need to do something really kind of interesting like CMDB for IT service management, those are available at Atlassian cloud. But the more robust and sort of larger implementations of those types of things are better served for either a server or data center product in something like Cumulus Cloud.
Sean O'Sullivan: You've already kind of touched on it. So maybe a little repeat here, but what would you consider the general customer experience so far when it comes to implementing Cumulus Cloud?
Amanda Babb: It's pretty much just a set it and forget it to be completely honest. When it comes to the choice is made, "Great, you're going to go with Cumulus Cloud." And usually within a few hours, we have a completely functional ready to go environment because we use configuration as code in order to do the deployment. It's set up exactly as we had described to you or your organization as a whole. Monitoring is already attached, logging and filing through various and sundry monitoring types of things are already ready to go. So basically as soon as you say, "Yep, let's do it," in less than 24 hours you have a completely functioning environment ready to go. And then depending on if you're migrating from your own hosts into Cumulus Cloud or if you're moving from, let's say Atlassian Cloud to Cumulus Cloud, then that might take a little bit longer. However, we offer those services as well and usually it's within the span of a couple of weeks where we can get you 100% up production ready to go with your current data.
Sean O'Sullivan: Set it and forget it. I feel like a lot of our government customers would like to apply that methodology to various aspects right now in the tech job. So it sounds pretty straightforward, Amanda. But real quick, can you just walk us through then the steps in adopting Cumulus Cloud?
Amanda Babb: Sure. Well, the first thing is is that if this is a totally Greenfield environment, meaning you've never used the Atlassian products before then pretty much we go through, of course, the account management process. We talk about what your potential growth might be within the Atlassian products. Of course, which Atlassian products you'd like to go ahead and deploy on Cumulus cloud. And then we put the environment together and basically tell you to run and have fun.
Now if you are moving from, say your own on prem solution or even from Atlassian Cloud, then we will work through what we call a technical questionnaire. Because we want to understand current versions, size, all of that so that we can adequately provide you the correct resources when we deploy Cumulus Cloud and then also when we start migrating data from whatever your current hosting solution is into Cumulus Cloud. So we walk through that step by step to really understand because of course we don't want your first experience with Cumulus Cloud to be underperformance, et cetera, et cetera. So we'll meticulously walk through that information, ask you all kinds of questions, and kind of walk with you through that whole process. Until we say, "Alright, here are the keys. Go ahead and run that thing on down the road."
Sean O'Sullivan: I got you. So my last question, and we know that, right? The Atlassian suite is continuing to expand. Right? And at the end of the day everyone's always going to ask, "Hey, what's the bottom line?" So just want to make sure I understand for our listeners today what kind of products in the Atlassian suite can be serviced with this solution and then, "Hey, what sort of ROI is realized here?"
Amanda Babb: Yeah, absolutely. So Cumulus Cloud has services included for Jira, confluence, Crowd, Bitbucket, Bamboo, Fisheye, and Crucible. For Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket of course we support the data center distributions of those particular products as well. And then for Bamboo, we also support the concept of elastic Bamboo. So if you did need to go ahead and flex agents up based on your build capacities, et cetera, that's something that we can accommodate for you as well.
In terms of the return on investment, again, a lot of that's going to be dependent on what your current infrastructure or hosting costs are, the current number of people that you have supporting the Atlassian products, all of those kinds of things. But of course, we walk you through the exact ROI on how we can make it more effective for us to host and manage services with the Atlassian products for you as opposed to y'all doing it yourselves so.
Sean O'Sullivan: Well I mean, Amanda, this has been a lot of valuable information. I think this is a really interesting solution. Right? That a lot of our government customers would be interested in learning more about. Where do you suggest they would go to learn more about the Cumulus Cloud and just maybe Praecipio's overall hosting services?
Amanda Babb: Yeah, absolutely. Everything that we've talked about today is on our website, which is praecipio.com. And for those of you all that have never spelled Praecipio before it is Praecipio.com. If you check under our solutions menu, then you'll see both support for hosting as well as our managed services. So all of the information on hosting and managed services is there. And from that page you can even reach out to our related blogs or webinars in addition to case studies that we have around Cumulus Cloud. So just by hitting one page, you can get to everything else that you need to find about how we can help you host and support your Atlassian products.
Sean O'Sullivan: Gotcha. And if there's one thing I think I'll take away from Cumulus Cloud today, I don't know if it was intentional or not Amanda, but the marketing taglines. Right? The set it and forget it, run and have fun. I couldn't help but notice that those are some really easy pitches there that we can use in the future with customers.
Amanda Babb: Absolutely.
Sean O'Sullivan: But hey Amanda, those are all great suggestions. I really appreciate your time and the valuable insight and information today. For our listeners, please check out Amanda's suggestions and the resources that we have on Carahsoft Atlassian Advantage website. You can contact us anytime via email at atlassian@carahsoft.com or you can always give us a shout at (833) 547-2468. Thank you again to Amanda from Praecipio. We appreciate your time and we'll catch everybody next time.